"How can you not care if you hurt people? What kind of utility function do you have, if it doesn't involve sapient flourishing?"

"I do what's good for me. You should try it sometime."

"Which things are good for you?" wonders Bird. "And how do you know?"

"If I want something, I get it. If I'm not getting something I want, I'm working to get it later. I don't deny myself things because they'd hurt people. And I certainly don't deny myself things because they're not right."

(Oh dear.)

"Is that what makes things good? What if you want things but then they're not as good as you thought? One time I wanted to eat an entire wheel of cheese and it turned out not to be very good for me at all."

"Hasn't happened yet. Maybe I've just got good instincts."

"You don't have regrets? Is that some kind of human disability?"

Edmund squirms slightly in his chair.

"It's a human superpower, actually."

"Humans have a lot of superpowers!"

"I'd offer to show you some more, but Teacher might get snippy."

The look that flits across Edmund's face this time is less embarrassed and more frightened.

Bird looks expectantly at the teacher, who will perhaps be better able to explain what just happened.

"He was offering to have sex with you," she explains neutrally, "and characterizing it as a 'human superpower' despite the fact that it is an innovation shared by 90% of observed multiversal species because he's obnoxious."

"But we're so good at it. That has to count for something."

"Sixty-fifth percentile of pleasure," she says absently. "We barely place."

"Oh! I thought he was threatening to murder me and I was confused how that related to being human."

"You have mistaken his intention in this very specific case. Shall we resume with the Amentan case study, or did you have further questions? For the record, I approve very much of organic debate; you are here to learn, not for me to talk at you."

She nods thoughtfully. "I don't think I have any more questions right now."

Sahar completes her explanation of the Amentan species.

"So. You have been informed. Let's say you're in a more conventional University session, one where you're encouraged to manipulate and enslave your classmates, and you have a classmate who happens to be an Amentan. You know that, given the opportunity, he will return to his world, bearing with him the secrets of FTL and dimensional travel, the ability to rewrite the minds around him at his whim, and no moral improvement whatsoever - because in this conventional session, of course, there is no Ethics class."

She leans back on her desk. "What do you do? Do you do anything - do you live and let live? Do you try to reach him on a personal level?"

Softly: "If that fails, do you subsume his will for the greater good?"

"If you were planning to enslave your classmates already and you don't want him to go home and do the things he's going to do if you don't, then probably enslaving him is a good idea!"

(No?????)

Sahar smiles. "I should state, for the record, that this example was drawn from my own time at MCU. So, that being the case, let's say that you are me - that you had intended to go through your semester without enslaving anyone who did not actively seek you out, and make it to graduation without violating your own ethical principles. But you have been given the potential to exert leverage over an ongoing moral atrocity. Do you compromise your ethical principles, in the knowledge that they are made to keep you from hurting the people, because more people would be hurt if you did not? It's not a question anyone else can answer for you. But it is a question each of you, if you have such an ethical system, is likely to face."

Edmund speaks up. "I think... I understand not wanting to do it, but I think there is a right answer here. You have to help the most people you can."